In recent years the growing use of telecommunications services has necessitated a need for advanced telecommunications service applications, such as call forwarding, call waiting, caller identification, and the like. Generally, an advanced service application is an application that provides features or functions that are not usually provided within a local switching system, that are relatively complex, that require coordination of multiple systems, and that are implemented typically through the use of data communications between or among a variety of telecommunications network elements.
In order to compete in the growing telecommunications industry, providers of telecommunications services offer a variety of promotional services as a part of their overall marketing strategy. For example, in order to increase sales of subscriptions to a call forwarding service application, a telecommunications service provider may offer twenty free uses of the call forwarding service application when the customer subscribes to the application. Telecommunications service providers may also offer a variety of rentable services. That is, a customer may rent a service application, such as call forwarding, for some period of time, for example, forty-five days.
Offering such promotional services as a part of the marketing strategy of the telecommunications service provider presents problems for the service provider's billing system. In a typical setting, for every use of a given service application, a billing record is sent blindly to the service provider's billing system whether the use was a free use or whether the use was to be charged to the customer via the customer's periodic bill. Ultimately, each use provided on the billing record corresponds to an entry on the customer's bill. When a customer has received free uses of a given service application as part of a promotion, or if the customer has rented the application for a set period of time or for a set number of uses, personnel in the billing system of the telecommunications service provider must program or adjust the billing system so that the customer will not be charged for the free uses or for the predetermined (often pre-paid) rented uses. That is, the billing system must adjust the billing system for each customer, each service application, and must sort out which uses of a particular service application were free or perhaps prepaid under a rental agreement.
Such adjustment of the service provider's billing system is cumbersome, time consuming and costly. In addition, such adjustment of the billing system sometimes results in billing entries for free or prepaid rented uses being omitted from the bill which is ultimately forwarded to the customer. However, often it is useful to provide the customer a bill containing a record of all uses of the service, even free or prepaid uses so that the customer receives a full accounting of his or her use of the service.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system for managing billing information for service application usage that is time efficient and cost efficient.
There is further a need for a method and system for managing billing information for service application usage at the service application level without the need for making adjustments to the telecommunications service provider's billing system.